FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 7 



there always prevails a disposition in the users of speech to reduce 

 everything to a common procedure. A certain form is not only in use, 

 but it is in far the most common use. The principle of analogy at once 

 asserts itself, for it appeals to every speaker. As most of certain 

 classes of words follow one particular inflection, why not make them 

 all assume it? The tendency manifests itself to have the leading form 

 grow at the expense of the others, and to discard from use all forms 

 which are different from it or in conflict with it. It does not often 

 meet with absolute success, to be sure, but it frequently meets with 

 great success; and the effort to make its success complete never 

 ceases. There is no better illustration of this than the history of the 

 declension of the noun in English. When we first come to the know- 

 ledge of our tongue during the Anglo-Saxon period, we find that 

 certain vowel declensions which had once existed had very largely 

 passed away. The comparison of other Teutonic languages reveals 

 what they must have been. The survival of occasional forms* leads 

 to the unavoidable inference that there was a time when theae de- 

 clensions were flourishing; indeed, they may have been flourishing 

 at the very time itself in some then existing dialect of which no 

 memorials have been preserved. What these declensions had lost, 

 other declensions had gained, especially the one most predominant. 

 Owing to agencies of which I shall speak later, the process of efface- 

 ment was temporarily arrested, or at least was largely shorn of its 

 strength. But the moment the restraining power of literature was 

 withdrawn in consequence of the Norman Conquest, the principle of 

 analogy resumed and carried out its work on a grand scale. When 

 English in the fourteenth century emerges with a literature so valu- 

 able as to possess an authority of its own,, not only have the varying 

 vowel declensions been reduced to the common inflection exhibited 

 by one of them, but even to that has been entirely conformed the 

 single but important consonant declension which had once been in 

 wide use. In the case of this last the process has gone on so steadily 

 that English furnishes to-day but the one word ox, with its- plural 

 oxen, as the single genuine survival in common speech of a declension 

 which embraced at one time about half the nouns of the language. 



Powerful as is the influence of analogy in reducing diversities to 

 a common unity, there is in existence an opposing agency which fur- 

 nishes resistance and at times the sturdiest resistance to this leveling 

 tendency. This, which, for the lack of a better name, I have called 

 the principle of authority, cherishes and strives to retain all variant 

 forms of inflection which are actually in existence and makes a deter- 

 mined stand against any change whatever, whether the change 

 would be for the better or the worse. That which is established has 

 authority simply because it is established. This influence varies 

 distinctly with the intellectual status of the users of speech; but it is 



